India-Pakistan Partition - Cinema's forgotten footnote

On the 65th anniversary of Partition, Satyen K Bordoloi explains how cinema has both valiantly used and neglected Partition as he tries to define a sub-genre called - 'Partition Cinema'.

The violence that erupted in India before, during and after the Partition on August 14, 1947 has no parallels in human history.

Close to 15 million people were displaced, the largest recorded so far. One million lost their lives in ethnic cleansing on both sides of the border. Thousands were abducted - mostly women and children - and at least 50,000 women were raped.

These are only estimates. The real figures may well be higher.

It was the bloodiest birth of a nation ever in recorded history. What happened in the Jewish Holocaust in Europe, barely a few years before Partition, was horrible. Yet, in many ways, the Indian Holocaust was much worse, something that had not yet been seen and hopefully the world will never see again.

Hundreds of films and documentaries have been made so far on almost every conceivable aspect of the Jewish Holocaust. Even today, films are made on it every year. In contrast, a mere 25 odd films have been centered on Partition.

This is surprising because the three major centres of film production in the subcontinent - Mumbai, Lahore and Kolkata - are dominated by people who have seen and felt Partition with their own eyes. The strangeness of a lack of Partition Cinema becomes that much more stranger when one considers that the Indian film industry boasts being the world's largest producer of films.

There are no obvious reasons to this gross neglect. What we can, instead, do is look at those that took Partition as their setting.

Image: Balraj Sahni's performance in Garm Hava as the stoic yet emotional patriarch trying to keep his family's head above the water has been called his best performance by most critics